This is the capstone course in Sociology’s Preparing Future Faculty
Program. With the focus in the first course on the “nuts and bolts”
of teaching in conjunction with an initial experience in an
independent class, and the focus in the second course on the
research and theory of pedagogy, the students in this course stand
in a unique position to bring together their experience, their
substantive, research-based knowledge on teaching and learning, and
their training in research methods at this point in their graduate
careers, to engage in creative activity around these issues.
In this course, we will follow the seminar model which will follow
the progress of the research. We will work as a consulting team
each week as each student discusses that aspect of their research
which follows the topic of the day (e.g., ethical considerations,
substantive contribution, methodological rigor, analysis problems,
and presentational issues). The final paper or project, of
publishable quality, must address an important issue of higher
education. Potential topics include student learning, historical
studies of changing profiles of higher education, the implication of
gender, race and class in higher education, or examining hypotheses
about roles and rewards. However, taking seriously Ernest Boyer’s
call to rethink the meaning of scholarship, projects can also focus
on the development of materials for teaching as long as they meet
the criterion of being prepared for dissemination to a scholarly
audience via publication.